The idle musings of a former military man, former computer geek, medically retired pastor and now full-time writer. Contents guaranteed to offend the politically correct and anal-retentive from time to time. My approach to life is that it should be taken with a large helping of laughter, and sufficient firepower to keep it tamed!

Monday, May 5, 2014

The real root of "gun violence"

Take away the astroturf games like the so-called grassroots organization(s) that sprung up (by magic!) out of Newtown and you wind up with a truly ugly truth when it comes to gun violence in this country: Most of it is gang-related, most of the gangs are in our inner cities, and our President, along with the rest of the so-called "mainstream media", simply refuses to address any of it.

The truth about that particular shooting? The gun, originally claimed to be stolen, wasn't. It instead passed through a number of hands, at least one of them on probation and a second person who allegedly took the weapon to the shooter knowing it was going to be used to commit violence, a 30ish old aunt who allegedly went for the show (seriously!) someone who unjammed the gun after it malfunctioned and gave it back to the girl who had just tried to murder the victim but the weapon failed to fire.

Nor is that all. We have another case where a "cute little charter-school graduate" (as presented by the family and the media) appears to have a bunch of social-media postings of her bearing weapons of all sorts, including a rather-large revolver that looks right out of a Clint Eastwood movie and a pump-action shotgun. Oh, and this angel apparently capped at least two people before being killed herself. She was 17.

Are we ever going to address this instead of playing Astroturf games with kids who are drugged up on various psychotropic meds and then go insane -- a rare but obviously far-too-common event?

Probably not.

Why not?

Because our Black President won't talk about it. Our liberal media won't talk about it. And we won't talk about it either, nor will we bring to the forefront the fact that we have essentially invented this problem out of whole cloth by generating a welfare and police state that empowers gangs by giving them the fuel (money) on which they rely.

And how did we do that? We declared various self-destructive behaviors among and between consenting adults unlawful, generating an entire second economic system under the carpet that was then used to justify a "war" that we ourselves created and then declared.

The result has not only been a monstrously-high prison population it has also been an explosion of violence, without which we would be far down the list when it comes to the abuse of guns and property crimes.

Instead of admitting our stupidity in this regard just as is the case with the medical industry and its monopolist scams in the general case we have instead grown an entire industry around arresting, prosecuting and imprisoning huge numbers of people, most of them minorities.

What's worse is that we are also watching them murder each other with wild abandon, while we sit in our chairs and refuse to talk about the statistical facts.

Indeed, if you take out black-on-black homicide in the major cities from our so-called "blood-red streets" that Bloomberg and others claim as our emblem of "endemic gun violence" you find that something like three quarters of all gun murders disappear.

He's absolutely right, of course. During my time as a prison chaplain, I was well aware that something over a third of all inmates were there for drug-related offenses - if one included gang-related offenses that actually stemmed from competition over drugs, perhaps more than half. They kept rolling in on the judicial system's 'War On Drugs' conveyor belt . . . but that conveyor belt never succeeded in slowing or halting the flow of drugs to the streets. Indeed, in 'real' (i.e. inflation-adjusted) money, drugs are cheaper today than at almost any time in the past, and often more freely available.

3 comments:

Ah, but it helps the government in so many ways! It's much easier to bust someone for drugs, the War on (some) Drugs provides our rulers with so much more power than they would have otherwise, and they even get to confiscate money/property that is in any way related! What's not to like, if you are a politician?

Glen, I don't think Mr. Grant doesn't argue that the cost to society ends if we end the War on Drugs. He argues that the War fails in its purpose to keep drugs out of society and the costly "enforcement" mechanism of prison is therefore a waste of taxpayer money.

He didn't say what would be a "solution" for the problem of drugs or if tax money could be used to implement that solution. We might want to spend exactly the same amount of money or more on some alternative.

There are even benefits to ending the War and just doing nothing. No billions flowing to cartel and terrorist hands, no danger to police from enforcement, no income to drug dealers, and peaceful stupefaction of drug users.